New Call of Duty gets YouTube streaming—for better or worse

When Call of Duty: Black Ops II comes out on Nov. 13, not only will it likely be one of the biggest selling games ever released but it will also take over YouTube.

Activision, the publisher behind the game, announced via a press release that they had partnered up with YouTube to allow players to directly livestream games on the popular video platform.

“With Call of Duty: Black Ops II, people can live stream their gameplay directly from the game or watch the best players live on YouTube, which is an awesome next step for the eSports community," Head of Game Partnerships Sang Kim stated in the company statement.

Gamers will be able to access the new feature on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Windows PC platforms so long as they have a verified YouTube account and Call of Duty Elite, a multi-tiered service (there’s a free version and a paid version) associated with the video game series that keeps track of a player’s record.

There’s no telling if this partnership will help the latest chapter in the Call of Duty supplant other first person shooter like CounterStrike, Halo, or Quake 4— three titles that have leagues devoted to them— as the game of choice amongst professional gamers.

Surprisingly, reaction to the announcement by the game’s fans has been largely muted.

Some have taken to the comment section of various sites to express their disapproval.

“Thrilling,” commented user Fred Tompkins on Joystiq. “As if players teleporting around due to crappy internet connections wasn't prevalent enough, now they can eat up 2/3 of their bandwidth streaming it to 0 viewers on Youtube.”

“Oh goody,” added Floss on Engadget, “more millions of hours of content being uploaded per second by 3-year-olds who think the world cares about them.”

The biggest question on everyone’s mind, however, is how long it will take for a Call of Duty player to accidentally stream himself having sex.